Geneva. Two sets of talks, one city, one delegation running between them. Iran in the morning. Ukraine in the afternoon. Lunch, presumably, somewhere in between.
The commentary focused, predictably, on who was present. The son-in-law. The friend of the boss. Two men from New York real estate, matched against Abbas Araghchi — who helped negotiate the JCPOA in 2015, watched it collapse, managed the wreckage, and returned to the same chair — and Vladimir Medinsky, who has been sitting across tables from Ukrainians since before most of the current analysis class had finished graduate school.
The mismatch is real. It has been noted. Extensively.
What has been noted less: the question is not who is at the table. It is who has been systematically kept away from it.
The European Disappearance
France was not in the room. Germany was not in the room. The United Kingdom was not in the room. This is not an oversight. It is architecture.
On the Iran file: there were no European negotiators. France stated its intention to participate. It was not included. The E3 — Britain, France, Germany — spent two decades as co-architects of the nuclear diplomacy that produced the JCPOA. They are the parties with the deepest institutional memory of what was agreed, what was traded away, and what the Iranians actually accepted versus what they publicly claimed. They were not invited.
On Ukraine: Macron reportedly pressed for Geneva as the venue, calculating that the multilateral hub would give Europe better access than the Gulf. He was right about the venue. He was wrong about the access. The Europeans were described as “largely excluded.” France, Germany, and Britain — the continent’s three largest military powers, the countries with the greatest material stake in what a European security settlement looks like — were waiting in the corridor that wasn’t there.
Washington’s message was not subtle. The deals will be American deals. Europe will implement them.
The Logic of Exclusion
Exclusion of this kind is not accidental. It requires effort. Negotiating formats do not spontaneously contract; they have to be designed to exclude. The trilateral format — US, Russia, Ukraine — was treated as sufficient. European security guarantees, which any durable settlement would ultimately require, were discussed without the Europeans present to discuss them.
The Ukrainians noticed. Zelenskyy’s statement after the second day was pointed: negotiators must raise the continuing Russian strikes with the Americans. Not with the Europeans. Not with NATO. With the Americans. Because the Americans are the only party that matters now, and Kyiv has absorbed that reality even if Brussels has not.
The Iranians noticed differently. Araghchi’s public statement after Geneva was not directed at Witkoff or Kushner. It was directed at history: the JCPOA collapse, the American withdrawal, the structural untrustworthiness of bilateral American guarantees unsupported by multilateral architecture. What Iran wants — what it has always wanted — is a framework that survives the next American election. Washington is offering something that may not survive the next American news cycle.
Without European co-signatories, without institutional embedding, Iran knows what a bilateral American commitment is worth. It watched the last one expire.
Palestinians. Ukrainians. Iranians.
There is a pattern worth naming.
In the Abraham Accords, the Palestinians were absent — not because their presence was inconvenient logistically, but because their claims were inconvenient structurally. The deal was designed around them. They did not see it. What followed, the world knows.
In the current Ukraine format, the Europeans are absent — not because they lack interest, but because their presence would complicate the American-Russian bilateral that Washington seems to be pursuing under the cover of trilateral talks. Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, is running a parallel track with the Americans on economic cooperation. Economic normalization, before a political settlement, before security guarantees, before European participation. The sequencing is not accidental.
In Geneva on the Iran file, the absent party is the architecture itself. Not France. Not Germany. The institutional framework that makes a commitment credible across administrations. The JCPOA survived because it was embedded in UN Security Council Resolution 2231. It died because one party treated a multilateral commitment as a bilateral option. What is being constructed now has no such embedding. It is a personal deal between governments that have every reason to distrust each other, with no institutional memory and no mechanism for enforcement if either side changes its mind — or its president.
This is not a new problem. It is the same problem, presented again in cleaner clothes.
Why It Matters
Exclusion is not merely a procedural issue. It determines what agreements are possible — and, more important, what agreements are durable.
Any Ukraine settlement that does not include European security guarantees will require European implementation. The Europeans will be asked to deploy peacekeepers, fund reconstruction, provide weapons systems, integrate Ukraine’s defence architecture into continental structures. They will do this under terms they did not negotiate, for a settlement they did not design, with red lines they did not draw.
Any Iran deal that lacks multilateral embedding will face the same structural vulnerability as the JCPOA. A bilateral American commitment is only as durable as the American administration that signs it. Tehran has thirty years of nuclear diplomacy to draw on. It knows this. The question is whether Washington does — or whether Washington has decided that the durability problem is someone else’s problem, after the deal is announced.
The pattern is consistent. Include the parties whose presence simplifies the deal. Exclude the parties whose claims complicate it. Present the result as a breakthrough.
Complexity is not resolved by removing the complex parties. It is deferred.
The Corridor, Revisited
In “The Corridor,” the argument was that the hallway outside the formal session is where movement becomes possible. That ambiguity is the only workable instrument when visible compromise is politically toxic.
That analysis holds. But it assumed a corridor accessible to all relevant parties.
What Geneva revealed is something different: a corridor with a guest list. The informal space that might have permitted genuine movement is itself structured to produce a particular outcome. Not resolution. Ratification. The parties who would complicate the outcome are excluded from the process that produces it.
The absent party is not a logistical problem. It is the diagnosis.
What Remains
Agreements designed by exclusion follow a recognisable trajectory. They are announced as breakthroughs. They are implemented by parties who resent the terms. They destabilize when the first excluded actor reasserts the interests that were never negotiated in the first place — because exclusion does not eliminate interests, it postpones them.
This pattern is not confined to any one city, any one administration, or any one file. It is a recurring diplomatic instinct: simplify the room, narrow the format, reduce the variables. Control the table, and the outcome appears manageable.
But negotiation is not a problem of geometry. Removing the complicated parties does not resolve complexity. It displaces it.
The excluded actors return — through implementation, through veto, through funding gaps, through security guarantees that must be delivered by those who never drafted the text. They re-enter the process not as guests, but as constraints.
Exclusion is not an accident of scheduling. It is a method of sequencing.
And sequencing, unlike settlement, does not end conflicts. It only moves them forward in time — to rooms that look different, but contain the same unresolved interests.
They were always going to show up eventually.
They always do.
Christopher Angel — officially silent, and biting anyway.